Explosive New Documents Unearthed On Live Nation/Ticketmaster

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2024-03-29 17:00:04

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Earlier this month, antitrust attorney Dan Wall wrote a blog post on behalf of his client, Live Nation/Ticketmaster, trying to rebut the scrutiny on his firm. And the tack he took was a bit surprising. “Concert promotion,” he wrote, “is not a highly profitable business, even for Live Nation.” Sure, Live Nation charges consumers a lot of money, and doesn’t pay much to artists. But they don’t, he wrote, set the ticket price. And even worse, for Live Nation shareholders at least, it’s just not a very good business, with the middleman giant affecting at most 2% of the price of a ticket for its trouble. “The narrative that Ticketmaster fees are responsible for high ticket prices makes no sense,” he added. “There is no way that’s true.”

It was a weird statement, considering Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino made $139 million in 2022. And according to new documents released by Congressman Bill Pascrell today from litigation in 2019, it’s flatly untrue. The allegations in the documents are “based upon Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s own financial data, documentation, and correspondence provided by Live Nation/Ticketmaster as part of discovery in a lawsuit that has been ongoing for well over a decade.” Live Nation, according to a lawyer facing the firm, “instituted a scheme which essentially defrauds everyone involved, from the artists to the ticket purchasers.”